Butler Baseball Makes Global Impact

Baseball is a universal sport. It brings together fathers and
sons, bridges generations and give people a common bond. In some
cases, as the Butler baseball program has found, the great game of
baseball can also bring together nations.

Steve Farley, in his 20th season as head coach at
Butler, has become an international ambassador of the sport since
participating in an amateur baseball clinic in Regensburg, Germany
several years ago as part of Major League Baseball’s Envoy
Program. For years, coaches from the US have gone overseas to teach
baseball to European coaches. This past March, the program was
flipped. European coaches came over to the US to learn the game on
American soil.

Benjamin (Benji) Kleiner, 33, came from Berlin to learn the
finer points of the game from Farley and the Bulldogs. Kleiner is a
player-coach for the Berlin Sluggers, a baseball club in Germany.
The sluggers, with Kleiner on the squad, have been a winning team
in the Second Bundesliga, which is essentially the
second-best club league in Germany. Much like the culture in
soccer, where your finish in the standings dictates your league for
the upcoming season, the Berlin Sluggers have now played their way
into Bundesliga, the top level of the sport in
Germany.

Kleiner originally learned of baseball as a youth, and
considered it an American alternative to Germany’s popular
brennball (“burnball”).

“All of the kids in Germany play brennball,” Kleiner
said.

The game essentially requires speed, baserunning savvy and a
strong arm. A play begins when the batter throws the ball as far as
he can. The defense must retrieve the ball and get it back into the
circle. Most Americans may equate this with the sandlot version of
“pitcher’s hand out.” The batter-runner must
decide how many bases to advance. If he is in between bases when
the ball is back in the circle, he is out.

It was this idea of learning a similar game that intrigued
Kleiner as an 11-year-old on a school field trip. One kid on the
trip had a bat, Kleiner recalls.

“From then on, we were all hooked on baseball,” he
said.

Kleiner credits Duane Phillips, an American architect who
coached youth club baseball in Germany, as his mentor in baseball.
It was Phillips who got Kleiner and other boys in Berlin in the
late 1980s to play the sport at an organized level. Until then,
Berlin children experimented with baseball on local soccer fields.
They used dirt bases.

Led by Phillips, Kleiner and the local youth struggled to learn
the sport. Playing against experienced kids on a nearby military
base, the young Germans picked up on two new loves: baseball and
Dr. Pepper.

“The American kids had Dr. Pepper,” Kleiner said.
“And Coke and Pepsi. And their pizza was different than ours.
I used to buy them out of the vending machines and sell them at
school for $5. We didn’t have any of that. But, we became
hooked.”

Under Phillips’ tutelage, Kleiner and his fellow Berlin
natives gradually got better. After a couple years of losing, they
realized how fun the new sport had become. Soon, baseball was
spreading throughout Germany and the America’s national
pastime was becoming more and more popular.

According to Baseball-Reference.com, the number of
baseball-playing Germans increased from 700 to 20,000 from 1985
until 1995. Currently, Kleiner estimates 30,000 players participate
in baseball. Now compare that number to the nation’s most
popular sport, soccer. In a nation of about 82 million people, an
estimated 20 million play soccer.

“That’s why it is important for me to come here and
learn from the Butler coaches and take what I learn back to
Germany,” Kleiner said.

After Kleiner’s time with the Bulldogs, Farley called
Kleiner “a first-class person.” The
20th-year head coach said Kleiner was a great
representative of his native Germany.

He hoped making the connection to baseball enthusiasts may open
doors for Butler University overseas and also for the baseball
program, perhaps helping Butler graduates play professional
baseball in Europe. There also may be chances for further baseball
diplomacy, as Farley took his team to Australia in 2003 for
six-game baseball exhibition tour. A similar trip to Europe may be
in the cards for the Bulldogs, Farley said.